Abstract
This article aims to analyze racial issues in the resistance community depicted in Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia Butler, named ‘Acorn’. By researching the critical approaches to this novel, I observed that, as much as they admit race as a force that interferes in the relation between offenders and offended, they have not gone further in questioning how the variety and the complexity of the previous backgrounds of these racialized subjects cannot be ignored and homogenized in the establishment of bonds among the offended as well. As I aim to demonstrate, the world experience carried by each character, determined especially by race and social class, helps meditating on their own asymmetrical positions and showing how their empathy towards one another has to be built and (re-)negotiated all the time.
Highlights
The main motivation for writing this article is to continue with an investigation by which I felt challenged after reading the article Octavia Butler: A Retrospective (2008), by Stephanie Ann Smith
Smith focuses on the changes that Octavia Butler brought to science fiction, a literary genre that went through a special process of re-signification in the latter half of the 20th century
Smith develops a brief analysis of some of Butler’s narratives – Fledging (2005), Kindred (1979) and “Bloodchild” (1995) – in order to illustrate her claim that Octavia Butler initiated a breakthrough on the ways SF/F was used to approaching the problems of Otherness, especially when this Other corresponds to a character of color
Summary
The main motivation for writing this article is to continue with an investigation by which I felt challenged after reading the article Octavia Butler: A Retrospective (2008), by Stephanie Ann Smith. Butler’s presence – in a moment when SF/F was dissociating itself from the stereotype of interstellar battles and becoming attached to “experiments of social justice” (387) – was crucial To prove her point, Smith develops a brief analysis of some of Butler’s narratives – Fledging (2005), Kindred (1979) and “Bloodchild” (1995) – in order to illustrate her claim that Octavia Butler initiated a breakthrough on the ways SF/F was used to approaching the problems of Otherness, especially when this Other corresponds to a character of color. My initial goal was to check how ambiguous other literary works by Butler could get, at least when it comes to the scope of characters’ development and racial issues To accomplish this purpose, I chose to focus on the first novel from Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, entitled Parable of the Sower (1993), since, following other perspectives, this novel was already an object of research in my Doctoral dissertation.
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